One social media policy fit all

From last week post ‘How can you get senior executives mandate Enterprise 2.0?’ , we concluded that business executives need IT people to well present benefits as well as risks of Social Media Networks (SMNs) before they approve and support its use. We also discussed briefly how implementing policies for SMNs can be an important tool to control and alleviate some of these risks. Today, we will elaborate more on this topic.

Dion Hinchcliffe is an Enterprise Social Media expert. He writes periodically on SMNs . A few months ago, Dion states in his weekly post that ‘One of the biggest issues I’m seeing is that social media, when it becomes a company-wide topic, rather quickly draws in the involvement of HR, legal, compliance, corporate communications, IT, and at least a couple of representatives from the lines of business. This sudden “coming together” obscures the exact location of ownership of social within the enterprise. This, combined with the difficulties of coordination of cross-functional sign-off on the requisite policy, governance, technology, and process issues, can often bog down efforts before they ever really begin,

This statement lists many issues facing the implementation of corporate-wide SMNs. However, we will focus on one issue which is ‘drafting policy’. If you need more insight in policy usage; you may take a look at previous posts where we explained what policies means and an example of Social Media policy statements.

Drafting policies for internal and\or external use of SMNs is a challenging task. However, don’t reinvent the wheel, you can brows other SMNs policies that been posted on other companies’ websites like IBM or Google . Moreover, Rooksby (2009) list some recommendations in this issue:

Learn how employees communicate and share, ask why and how people communicate and share.

Understand the organization’s structure and learn where there are barriers to communication.

Understand the legal and regulatory issues around information sharing.

How do laws such as the data protection act, industrial regulation and organizational policy
shape the possibilities for information sharing and communication.

However, these are still general recommendations and lack the know-how framework .If we exclude static legal and liability statements (usually the same for most corporate –wide policy documents), the rest is to a great extend a blurrily territory of SMNs use and very hard to regulate (ex. personal vs. business use of SMNs, the time we spend on using SMNs, network security issues, monitoring activities..act) .Accountemps, the world’s first and largest staffing services firm specializing in accounting and finance , conducted an large-scale survey in late 2010 and reported that 59 percent of 1400 interviewed chief financial officers (CFOs) stated that their greatest concern of social networking site use in the workplace employees is the wasting time on SMNs (MOQBEL, 2012).In fact, the nature of this technology that we trying to regulate are constantly changing (dynamic) since there are so many SMNs products coming everyday to market with different functionality and use.

As SMN’s policy maker deals with many social, legal, technological and business variables, they clearly can’t make a general corporate-wide Social Media policy for all SMNs or even for each Industry. I fact , if a group of businesses belong to the same industry such as retails , the context is different for each business in term of business environment, business processes, legality, products…act. For example, malls, convenience store, E-retailers, vending machines…act.

The Policy Development Life Cycle (PDLC) for SMNs is a hot topic in Information Systems and Policy studies since there are many issues other than what we did cover in this post. However, the question is what businesses should do? Should they wait until these issues and risks are resolved by well-established regulations and policies ? , I think looking at the half full glass with a focuse on benefits will be the best choice; businesses can’t afford not to be part of this phenomenal because it will lose competitive edge eventually.

We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media; the Question is how well we Do it – Erik Qualman (Qualman, 2010)

but how you feel about that !

Abdul

References:

MOQBEL, M. (2012). THE EFFECT OF THE USE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES IN THE WORKPLACE ON JOB PERFORMANCE. Texas A&M International University.
Rooksby, J., Kahn, A. W., Keen, J., & Sommerville, I. (2009). Social networking and the workplace. Strategic Direction, 25(8), 20-23.
Qualman, E. (2010). Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business: Wiley.

11 comments

In my opinion the business that require the use of social medias are the one that have high competitor which are most of the business nowadays. You don’t have to go 100% but you need to at least take part in the SMNs. SMNs are really good for external use such as branding and advertising. However, if your business is small you can avoid internal use of the SMNs just to avoid many risks such as the employees use too much time on the SMNs.

Hi
Right, so you are saying Internal SMNs for Large enterprises only, External SMNs for both. But most risks that I read about SM use is coming from External use…
Also the good thing is that external use policies are mostly the same in most firms from same industry, why reinvent the wheel.
Cheers

Hey Abdul,
nice post! However is this supposed to be your Week 5 assignment or just a general post? If it’s supposed to be assignment you should maybe try to integrate an example and work with that as suggest in the task description. I like the general touch to your post but I’m not sure if jason will. If it’s an extra piece, I have to say great effort!🙂
There are also some typos in the text and I think that could cause some unnecessary deductions.
On topic: I actually think there could be maybe not a one size fits all strategy but at least a general social media policy that would cover a company from the most legal risks. So as you suggested I think there is no need to reinvent the wheel and the one size fits all policy might not be as far off as you think, after all🙂

Hi Alex ,,
Thanks for your valuable comments , i did some changes t to comply with the week5-task requirments (Accountemps case study ..). However, i always believe that the important thing is to raise new issues to your classmates to think about , not to write about the same things everybody will cover in thier posts.

Hey,
I totally agree with you! If you have read my first blog post that’s actually what I wanted to strive for myself. However in the end I was fearing for my grade so I returned to play along with the assignment😉 So, you have one supporter right here…🙂
Cheers!

I think one way of monitoring social media use is through policy . New employees need to sign social media policy agreements along with their employment agreement for existing employees need to be amended. This will protect an organisation from any potential breach. However, it cannot be completely eliminated, employees can set up other usernames, Twitter accounts, hash tags etc and just avoid the policy altogether.

Thank you for your comment,
In general, Policy is a tool to provide guidance & prevent some risks. And it is very much binding agreement for both parties.
It is hard and almost unrealistic to have policy that addresses all kind of risks.

Really in depth look at social media policies and the implications on organisational efficiency. I think there is a very fine line between the level of constraint placed on employees and the potential for losing the benefits of social media engagement – i.e. the humanizing element that it can give organisations both big and small. What are your thoughts?